Hi again Thrivers,

This evening I write to you from a dazzling spring snowstorm that’s so pleasant. The snowflakes are big, wet, and coming down with a force that gently quiets the ambient distractions of life. A collective breath in, and long, steadying breath out.

Sunday was the new moon and a few of us gathered around a fire to drink tea, play music, release old stories that no longer serve, and speak aloud our intentions for the coming month. More and more I’m finding that rituals offer reflective space and meaning in my life. And I feel a stronger potency when those rituals are aligned with celestial rhythms. Full moon hike + tea meditation. New moon fire + storytelling. Breath in, breath out.

What rituals are meaningful to you and your family?

And with much joy and delight, on to this week’s Thriving Thursday.

On the value of valiant vulnerability

📚 🏅 This past week I finished listening to Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead. In TT 008 I wrote about how impactful I found her insights and her work - it’s worth circling back to honor her style and her synthesis.

This book excelled in a number of meaningful dimensions:

1. Metaphor design - Brene somehow threads the needle of using potentially-violent metaphors (Roosevelt’s arena, the armory, rumble, revolution) without ever falling to the tropes of destructive, extractive language. It all feels internally consistent and reinforcing while being empowering and uplifting.
2. Storytelling - Brene is a master of sharing small moments in her life to build connection and prove the point. In doing so, she feels very accessible and human while cementing abstract, diffuse concepts with smile-inducing catch phrases like “People, People, People” and “The Ham Fold-over Debacle”. Among others, these short phrases are bookmarks for a resonant story that points to a larger moral and life lessons to carry.
3. Action-oriented awareness - Throughout the book, we’re offered practical examples, worksheets, playbooks, and other resources to immediately put the big ideas into action. And each worksheet and playbook is reinforced with a story to showcase how hard, and how rewarding, doing the recommended action can be.
4. Progressive structure & flow - The book is organized in a coherent way with every part building on it’s predecessor in a clear, intuitive, compelling way. I never felt lost, distracted, or disengaged from the content and the clarity it provides.

🎯 Also, I loved how her final chapter was a crescendo synthesis of exactly how to do her methodology in a simple check list. I’m paraphrasing reductively, but here is the gist of how to lead with courage, vulnerability, and integrity:

Step 1 - Set the intention –> Clarity & container curation​
Step 2 - Engage with an open heart and mind –> Self-reflection & awareness​
Step 3 - Acknowledge blockers to showing up –> Self-reflection & awareness​
Step 4 - Specify exactly what we’ll do to be present –> Commitment​
Step 5 - Offer ourselves permission –> Self-empathy, trust building​
Step 6 - Speak to emotions in the room –> Other empathy, trust building​
Step 7 - Set meeting agenda grounded in curiosity –> trust building, shame reduction​
Step 8 - Share stories we’re telling ourselves –> trust building, shame reduction​
Step 9 - Ask meaningful, inquisitive question –> reflection, exploration​
Step 10 - Pinpoint limiting narratives and behaviors –> exploration, shame reduction​
Step 11 - Identify new information –> reframing, resetting​
Step 12 - Key learnings –> synthesis​
Step 13 - Next steps –> action​
Step 14 - Fold into culture and future behavior –> integration​
Step 15 - Circle back and check in –> validation, trust building

That seems like a solid roadmap for relating authentically in any context, though I see how that can dramatically improve more stilted or formal relations in a professional setting. If you want to learn more check out the resources from her book.

A deep bow of reverence to Dr. Brown’s research and mission in life. It’s undoubtedly making the world a better place.

On the unit of knowledge in science

📏 👨🏻‍🔬 I’ve been working on a fascinating side project with Joel Chan, a professor at University of Maryland focused on systems that support creative knowledge work.

The collaborative project is a proof of concept shared Roam graph experiment where a small group does a multi-disciplinary scientific literature review on COVID-19 primary and secondary transmission rates for children. The twist is that we’re using Joel’s most current synthesis model for the fundamental unit of awareness in science: a contextualized observation note (renamed from a grounded claim).

In short, citing papers wholesale creates too much wiggle room for biases (from the primary author, the research methods, the research funders, and oh so much more) whereas mixing and matching grounded observations across studies provides so much more nuance and granularity to academic awareness.

So the project consisted of taking 10 papers, parsing out the contextualized observation notes, then remixing them into a personalized synthesis. Importantly, our individualized synthesis does not rely on (though it can certainly be informed by) the conclusions of the primary authors directly - we form our own perspective based on the actual research and findings.

I have a rich and deep respect for the scientific tradition. At the same time, I question a lot of the incentives and structures for how knowledge is generated and, more broken still, how it’s communicated. Joel’s framework fixes a number of structural problems in academia and has transformed how I think about and digest scientific literature.

Dream with me for a moment - instead of having to wade through dense, miserable science writing, what if we had an “academic synthesis library”? This library would be composed of floors:

• Ground level - academic articles (where most science operates today)
• Second floor - contextualized observation notes (complete with tags for dynamic surfacing on relevant topics)
• Third floor - Simple, plain english questions (with all of the supporting evidence neatly organized for personal discovery)
• Rooftop view - Simple, plain english answers (with levels of certainty and linear discovery flow back through questions, observation notes, and primary sources)

The beauty of this structure is that it delineates objective experimentation results from subjective interpretation of those results. The simple truth is that reasonable people, presented with the same exact observable evidence, can come to meaningfully different conclusions. And that diversity of thought and experience is exactly what we want to nurture!

It’s easy to imagine a single, simple question having multiple synthesized answers based on how certain evidence is weighed or interpreted. And, naturally, those answers will only prompt more questions (that professional researchers may or may not have considered in their ivory tower echo chambers). Remixing the set of current, reputable research using this framework can yield tremendous new depth of insight and awareness in wide-ranging disciplines. Plus, it sidesteps the fallibility of individual experts by providing untainted observations.

Of course, I’m thinking about how to apply this to my Universal Theory of Thriving. I’ve got ideas aplenty and will be exploring them in the months and years to come. When I quiet my rational mind (which is spinning hard on this framework of thought), my deeper wisdom suggests this is a huge piece of the puzzle for GIFT.

On questioning the experts

🤨 🎓 I’ve written recently about Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep and how impactful it was in changing my self-destructive behaviors around sleep.

In our last project call, Joel turned me on to a Alexey Guyez’s compelling critique of the book.

Man, Alexey does not pull any punches. After 150+ hrs of researching and debunking Chapter 1 alone (!!), Alexey diligently documents why Walker’s work is not to be taken at face value.

In my reading of the critique, Alexey points out that Matthew systematically overstates and oversimplifies his case. I imagine the narrative is directionally accurate, but probably not as straightforward and one-sided as Dr. Walker suggests.

OK, now imagine an “inside out book club” for popular science books. Before reading the book itself, we do the following process:

• Step 1 - Ask simple questions we hope the book will answer
• Step 2 - Identify the top 25 cited scientific articles from the bibliography (proxy for quality / validity)
• Step 3 - Identify the top 25 cited articles not in the book bibliography, but commonly cited in the top 25 from Step 2 (to avoid selection & confirmation bias)
• Step 4 - Parse out contextualized observation notes from those 50 articles and tag to questions accordingly
• Step 5 - Synthesize answers (individually or in small groups) to the Step 1 questions from the raw literature
• Step 6 - For any given question, discuss similarities and differences in synthesized answers across pods

Then and only then do we proceed to

• Step 7 - Read the book and see how the author formulated their own questions and answers
• Step 8 - Discuss how the author’s synthesis difference from the group’s synthesis grounded in the raw primary literature

Granted, this process is much more time consuming and intense than just casually skimming a book or listening to an audiobook. At the same time, I know I don’t have 150+ hours like Alexey committed to dissecting a single chapter of a single book. Distributing the parsing of contextualized observation notes is the only way to do this at any meaningful scale. I wonder if the depth of clarity and sense-making may be worth the extra effort in the short term.

Would you be interested in joining an inside out book club for pop sci books? Or is this just nerdy gibberish?T

On practicing analytically and performing intuitively

⛳ ️ 📊 Golf is a curious sport, and I’ve never been drawn to it myself (unless it’s the disc variant, which I love playing!).

Still, I was enthralled by David Perell’s recent piece about an up and coming golfer who marries rigorous technological analysis with “what feels right” in the moment.

Overall, I believe that human brains are pattern processing wonders of the world. We are designed to take in immeasurable quantities of data every microsecond and somehow organize that into a coherent stream of survive and thrive behaviors. And, we’re also designed to stitch that data into stories or narratives, even when our stories are clearly false.

Intuition is powerful, but cannot be trusted wholesale.

I resonate with Daniel Kahneman’s, nobel laureate and author of Thinking, Fast & Slow, reflection on and definition of intuition:

“Intuition is defined as knowing without knowing how you know,” he explained. “That’s the wrong definition. Because by that definition, you cannot have the wrong intuition. It presupposes that we know, and there is really a prejudice in favor of intuition. We like intuitions to be right.”

According to Kahneman, a better definition — or a more precise one — would be that “intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do.” By this definition, the intuition could be right or it could be wrong, he added.

Based on Kahneman’s research, we can best trust our intuition when:

1. There is systematic regularity that can be observed and learned
2. We have extensive practice observing and learning that regularity
3. There are short feedback loops to guide whether our intuition was right

The reason David’s observations in golf make sense is because

1. golf is a relatively regular system of biomechanics and physics
2. professional golfers practice that system regularly
3. they can instantly see if they hit the ball where they want it to land

So it sounds really pretty to say “practice analytically, perform intuitively” but there are areas where performing intuitively could be dangerous such as picking stocks (too chaotic of a system), engaging truly foreign cultural sets (not enough practice), or climate change (extensively long feedback loops). In each of these situations, intuition may yield suboptimal outcomes based on our incomplete awareness and internalized biases.

That said, within the bounds of the limitations of intuition, I really resonate with the idea of broadening the inputs to our intuition engine with rigorous analytic inquiry. The more information we have, the sharper our intuition can be. Technology is unlocking a tremendous potential to observe external and internal phenomena in a more objective way, and that can be used for the power of good to inform and enhance our subjective experiences.

At least that’s what feels right with no practice in my irregular reality.

On the blissful beauty of birds

The Bird Photography of the Year recently released their 2021 finalists. This competition supports bird conservation efforts.

Holy shamoly there are some stunning photos in here. This one in particular stood out to me:

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Well, I can vulnerably say that I intuitively question my knowledge units regularly.

As long as I can do so analytically, the voices in my head are a feature, not a bug. Am I right or am I right?

Until next week,

~Henry

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